The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other Government agencies have concentrated efforts to clean up the environment. The clean up efforts require mapping of locations where hazardous materials have been dumped and determining the concentrations and extent of contamination. One method of determining the concentrations and extent of the contamination caused by hazardous materials is by sampling the soil in the suspect areas.
Many of the hazardous materials contained in the contaminated soil are volatile organic compounds. A major problem in the soil sampling procedures currently being used is the loss of the volatile organic compounds contained in the soil prior to the analysis of the soil sampled.
The patent literature contains many soil sampling devices such as : U.S. Pat. No. 3,075,588 to Mitchell, U.S. Pat. No. 3,326,049 to Eley, U.S. Pat. No. 3,463,732 to Woodward, U.S. Pat. No. 3,497,018 to Shultz et al., U.S. Pat. No. 3,690,389 to Van De Beld et al., U.S. Pat. No. 3,696,873 to Anderson, U.S. Pat. No. 4,549,612 to Cushing, U.S. Pat. No. 4,556,114 to Ryan, and U.S. Pat. Des. Nos. 269,844. However, these devices do not solve the problem of losing volatile organic compounds prior to the analysis of a sample of contaminated soil.
The present invention provides a soil sampling kit and a method for sampling the soil utilizing the soil sampling kit to minimize the loss of volatile organic compounds prior to the analysis of the soil sample.